John 6:38

‘For I am come down from Heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me'.

He stresses once again that He has come down from Heaven, and that in order to do the Father's will. It is important not to glide over this amazing fact. We can so take it for granted that we lose the wonder of it. For as we will discover in John 17:5 the point was that He had put aside the glory which He had had with the Father before the world was, for our sakes. He had left the splendour of heaven, and His exalted place within it, and had abased Himself by coming to earth. The verb is now in the aorist, indicating a specific once-for-all coming down as man. But He emphasises that He has not come down from Heaven simply to choose His own path and do whatever He wants. Rather He has come to do the Father's work in the Father's way. He has a divine task to fulfil. Father and Son are working in total cooperation. Thus those who feed on Him by hearing Him and trusting in Him, will in fact be those given to Him by the Father. Father and Son are working together in total unison.

‘Not to do my own will'. He was, of course, doing His own will as He was well aware, for His will aligned with His Father's will. But His point was that His primary concern was to do the Father's will. His was not a ‘one-man exercise'. The whole of the Triune God was involved.

We have here a reminder that the reason that Jesus is described as ‘the Son' is partly because He is ‘the One sent' to represent the Godhead, in the same way as a son might be sent by his father as representative of the whole family. The idea of ‘Sonship' also indicates to us that He shares the same nature with the Father. He is the only true Son by nature. What it does not signify is that He was born at some point in time after the Father. For in eternity He is co-eternal and co-equal with the Father (‘in the beginning the Word was already in existence' - John 1:1).